The Russians Are Coming

Whatever other differences Stalin and Khrushchev might have had, they were of like mind on one issue: they liked hummable music. In 1948, Russia's leading composers were summoned to a meeting and warned of the evils of the unmelodious music of Western modernists. Stick to "socialist realism," they were told. Under Nikita, the malady lingered on. Said he: "We flatly reject this cacophony music. Our people cannot use this rubbish as a tool of their ideology."

Now, apparently, the Kremlin has permitted a trade of the tools. In the past few years an impressive group of young avant-garde composers have blossomed in the Soviet Union. Last week Composer Boris Tishchenko made his first trip outside Russia to hear the Western premiere of his atonal Concerto Grosso at the annual spring festival in Prague.

Concerto Grosso, first prize winner in the Festival's international competition for new music, begins with a lengthy, cello solo, working complex variations of a four-note theme, builds to a climax with the drums thundering and a clarinet shrieking above a surging mass of sound. Tishchenko does not fall victim to the rhythmic fecklessness that plagues so many of the post-Webernists. Even his quiet passages have a discernible pulse, and the faster movements bristle with a tough rhythmic muscularity.

Tishchenko, 27, is a relative newcomer to the ranks of the Russian moderns, which are led by a trio of young Turks:

P: Edison Denisov, 37, from Siberia, teaches orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory. His cantata, The Suns of the Incas, which was performed in Darmstadt and Paris last year, combines elements of both twelve-tone and chance (improvisational) music. Named by his electronics professor father for Thomas Edison, Denisov is regarded as the most important and adventuresome of the new voices in Russian music.

P:Valentin Silvestrov, 27, a onetime engineer, is a graduate of the Kiev Conservatory. Though he came late to music, he is one of the most original of the new Soviet composers, has extensively explored the outer reaches of avant-garde music. His Spectrums was the first example of the chance style performed in Russia.

P: Andrei Volkonsky, 33, the son of Prince Mikhail Volkonsky, studied in Paris, later at the Moscow Conservatory. A performance of one of his compositions in Leningrad in 1960 caused such an intramural scandal that no new work of his was played for five years. The silence was ended last spring with the premiere of a cantata, The Laments of Shchaza. Volkonsky composes in the twelve-tone style, but he is also a first-rate concert harpsichordist and a leader in the revival of baroque music in Russia.

Just how much of the new Russian music will be heard in the West is questionable. Many of the young composers are reluctant to allow performances outside Russia. Nothing, they know, can bring censure faster than praise from the decadent West.

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